The tools we use to run Woodruff and Co

As a small business (it’s just the two of us!), we’re constantly thinking about and experimenting with technology and services that can help us streamline and simplify the everyday tasks involved in running Woodruff and Co. We’ve been in business for over a year now, and – while we’re certainly no experts – along the way we’ve discovered some neat tools that help make running our business just a little quicker, easier and smarter.

In many cases, there are a number of other options similar to the ones we’ve listed below and a lot of it comes down to personal preference and what suits your business needs best. But for us, we’ve found that these best suit our needs. For now. So, here are the tools that we use on a daily basis to run our business.

Australia Post

We use Australia Post for shipping all orders, and have since we started. Overall we’ve been really satisfied with the service, and we have a great team at our local post office. We started with Click and Send and then when volumes increased, we moved to eParcel to access better shipping rates (and pass on those savings to our customers), and more importantly have the ability to integrate with third parties to streamline the label printing process.

Ready to Ship

eParcel is a great, but processing shipping labels through their website is a very manual and time-consuming when you’re sending decent volumes. Enter Ready to Ship, a really clever Australia-based automated label printing and tracking service, which connects our e-commerce store to eParcel. Ready to Ship creates and formats your shipping labels (which you can print on labels that Australia Post provide) AND talks to your e-commerce store to populate tracking details. It cuts out A LOT of the work involved with picking and packing orders.

Evernote

We are constantly taking notes, photos, clipping articles or jotting down ideas for the business and we use Evernote so that it’s all in one place. Evernote’s search functionality is really good, you can share notes and notebooks with other users and it syncs instantly on all your devices. And, it’s free.

Dropbox

Dropbox is super convenient for sharing and syncing files across devices. We store all working files in Dropbox, which can then be accessed from anywhere. And, they’re backed up in the cloud. Dropbox is also great for sharing files, especially really large artwork files which we’re often working with.

Asana

With lots on the go at any one time, it’s so easy to lose track of tasks – and if you’re working with one or more partners – who’s doing what. We use Asana for all tasks and projects to do with the business, as well as managing our order flow.

Xero

Xero. Is. Awesome. It’s an New Zealand-based accounting software, similar to MYOB and Quickbooks. We’ve integrated Xero with our bank account feed, and set up auto-categorisation rules to help manage the financial side of our business.

Other

Some of the other tools we use regularly are listed below. If you have any questions on anything we’ve listed here, leave a comment below, or send us an email.

WordPress
WooCommerce
Stripe
Google Analytics
Google Docs
Adobe Illustrator
Airmail 3 for Mac